Veganuary: Intervention to Sustainable Consumption

I began to look at veganuary, as my project being based around sustainability within the food industry, with the growing attention to the impact these animal products are having on the enviroment, this has caused a shift in the market towards plant based products. Veganuary is a charity that promtes veganism as an intervention for sustianable consuption, I wanted to understand the theories behind veganuary attempts to change peoples consumption behaviour and apply it to my rebrand. Veganuary targets cosumers through three different intrests of veganism, animal welfare, enviromental reasons and health reasons. so it is getting people from three different audiances making it a lot more accessible and making their demographic as a wole a lot more diverse. Veganuary began in 2014, 3300 people signed up and after 4 years the number of peopletaking part in 2018 was over 150,000. “Veganuary is dedicated to changing public attitudes, while providing all the information and practical support required to make the transition to veganism as easy and enjoyable as possible.” (Veganuary, 2018). They identify the importance of providing information and of changing public attitudes, as highlighted in the above quote. To do this, they lean on certain theories which could explain why their methods would lead to behaviour changes, two examples of which are the Information-Deficit Model and the Theory of Planned Behaviour.

Information-Deficit Model

The information-deficit model is a representation of the assumption that if people were better
informed then they would change their behaviour. It has been emphasized in
many studies that it is crucial that consumers have the availability of information regarding
sustainable consumption in order to ensure they have power to change to their behaviour

This can be applied to Veganuary, due to the huge amount of information that they provide on their
website about the impact that eating animal products has on the environment, animal welfare and
personal health. Therefore, they are assuming that if consumers were more aware of these issues,
then they would be willing to change their behaviour.

Theory of Planned Behaviour.

The Theory of Planned Behaviour is a framework for understanding and predicting a persons’
behaviour. It identifies three determinants of intention, attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control which inturn predicts behaviour


It is hard to tell if veganuary has been successful as an intervention of sustainable consumerism, the growing numbers would say so but it is still ard to tell. My rebranding of Heck sausages will encourage people to try more plant based producst but will do it in a way that appeals to more people, by not branding it as an alternative but a product in itself, sold alongside meat making them more likely to pick it up off the shelf.